Contributing Faculty

Charles Dobbs

Department of History
639 Ross
294-1373
cdobbs@iastate.edu

Professor of History, (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1978), American diplomatic history, American military history, East Asian history, the Cold War, history of military technology, author of 2 books in history and 3 outside of history, 17 scholarly refereed articles, and nearly 300 encyclopedia entries.

James T. Andrews

Department of History
645 Ross
294-3828
andrewsj@iastate.edu

Associate Professor of History, (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1994) social and cultural history of Russian/Soviet science and technology; science, society and public culture; intersection of science, technology, and popular culture in a comparative EurAsian context.

Michael D. Bailey

Department of History
621 Ross Hall
294-1284
mdbailey@iastate.edu

Assistant Professor of History (Ph.D. Northwestern University, 1998), specializing in high and late medieval religious and cultural history, especially the history of magic, witchcraft, superstition, and the historical interaction of religion, magic, and science. Michael Bailey's first book, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, explored the rise of ideas of diabolical witchcraft in the context of fifteenth-century religious culture. His Magic and Superstition in Europe (forthcoming) traces the history of magic and superstition from ancient times to the present, with particular attention given to medieval condemnations of magic, early-modern witch-hunts, and the interplay between learned Renaissance magic, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. His current research deals with clerical authorities' deployment of the category of superstition in the late-medieval period. He has also written a Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft, as well as several articles in academic journals. He has held fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright program, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Humanities Forum of the University of Pennsylvania.

Lina Del Castillo

Department of History
649 Ross Hall
294-5620
linadel@iastate.edu

Assistant Professor of History (Ph.D. 2007, University of Miami)
Latin American History; 19th Century Colombia History;
U.S./Latin American Relations; Science, Technology, and Medicine
in Latin America; Gender, Race, and Class in Latin American History;
History of Geography and Cartography

Bob Hollinger

Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies
433 Catt Hall
294-0053
rholling@iastate.edu

Prof of Philosophy (PhD Wisconsin, 1972). Major interests: philosophy of social and behavioral sciences; sociological theory; philosophy of technology; STS and philosophy of science (including feminism); 19th-20th century European and American Intellectual history; democratic theory; Nietzsche and Heidegger; educational theory and the university (democratic education). Some relevant publications: Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach (Sage, 1994); The Dark Side of Liberalism: Elitism vs Democracy (Praeger, 1995); Pragmatism: From Positivism to Postmodernism (co-editor); Hermeneutics and Praxis (editor). Current project: Withering Ivy: A View from the Vine a critique of the corporate university and certain versions of cultural studies, which, I argue, are in effect -- if not intent-- conspiring to destroy the liberal ideal of the university, and the educational ideals of the university in general.

Kevin Amidon

Department of World Languages and Cultures
300 Pearson
294-4046
ksamidon@iastate.edu

Assistant Professor of German Studies in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (Ph.D., Princeton, 2001). Kevin Amidon's current large-scale project, entitled The Diagnosis of Difference: Practice and Persuasion in German Biology, 1890-1945, explores the relationships between investigational and persuasive practice in the proliferating German life sciences around and after 1900. He also continues to work on musical and opera culture in German-speaking Europe, and has published on Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, and Franz Kafka. During 2003-2004 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Emily Godbey

Department of Art and Design
388 Design
294-8422
egodbey@iastate.edu

Assistant Professor of Art and Design (PhD University of Chicago 2005; MFA Rhode Island School of Design, 1993). Emily Godbey specializes in the history of photography and early film and is interested in the ways that creativity and technology intersect in image-making. She teaches courses on material culture, gender and art, and popular visual culture. Her publications include a meditation on the mapping of the Aztec capital in "Seeing the New World as the Old: The 1524 Map of Tenochtitlán" in 'Itinerario,' an analysis of the use of photography as a technological tool for healing in "Picture Me Sane: Photography and the Magic Lantern in a Nineteenth-Century Asylum" in 'American Studies,' and a consideration on early microscopic films and germ theory in "The Cinema of (Un)attractions: The Microscopic On Screen" in 'Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital (Stockholm Studies in Cinema)'. Due out at the end of this summer is a new article on the 1889 Johnstown flood and its photographic representations: "Disaster Tourism, Thanatourism, and the Melodrama of Authenticity: Revisiting the 1889 Johnstown Flood" in 'Pennsylvania History_,
Summer 2006. She is currently working on a presentation involving speed, technology, and the Iowa State Fair for the SHOT conference in October 2006 in Las Vegas. She has been a Whiting Fellow of the University of Chicago's Franke Center for the Humanities, and she recently received a grant from Iowa State's Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities.

Thomas Leslie, IAIA

Department of Architecture
589 Design
294-8460
tleslie@iastate.edu

Associate Professor of Architecture (M.Arch Columbia 1992).  Thomas Leslie researches and writes on the role of building construction and engineering in architectural design.  His 2005 book, Louis I Kahn: Building Art, Building Science explored the importance of these issues in some of Kahn's masterworks. Currently he is researching the role of industry and material in the evolution of the Chicago skyscraper from 1880 to 1920. He teaches courses in building technology, design, and history. Prior to teaching, he practiced for seven years with Norman Foster and Partners, a London design firm known for its integration of engineering and architecture.

Gordon Hull

Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies
431 Catt Hall
294-2484
ghull@iastate.edu

Asst. Professor, Dept. of Philosophy and Religious Studies (Ph.D. Vanderbilt, 2000). Gordon Hull works in philosophy of technology and in political philosophy, with a general emphasis on 'continental' thought. He is currently completing a book manuscript on Thomas Hobbes that studies Hobbes's contributions to a distinctly 'modern' (in the seventeenth-century sense) view of political philosophy. He has written several papers on contemporary issues in law and technology, with a particular emphasis on intellectual property and the ways that digitality forces alterations in our underlying legal and political theory. He has a paper due out this fall that critiques the Supreme Court's 2003 decision upholding a requirement for library filtering programs, and is working on a piece that
critically examines Lockean justifications for strong intellectual property rights. He teaches a course in the philosophy of technology
every semester.

Michael J. Golec

Department of Art and Design
Departmentof Architecture
389 Design
294-3796
mjg402@iastate.edu

Assistant Professor of Art and Design History (PhD Northwestern University 2003). Michael J. Golec researches and writes on historical issues that arise from the intersections of design, science, and technology. Professor Golec has taught courses on the visual culture of the sciences and the impact of technology on culture. His research interests include representations of science for a non-scientific public and perfection and the technological
enhancement of the home. His "Visual Style and Forms of Science in the Cold War" is forthcoming in Visible Culture: Design Artifacts and Participated Meaning and "Vision and Blindness in Ray and Charles Eames' Powers of Ten" in Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life
Sciences.

Carl Herndl

Department of English
357 Ross
294-7590
chg@iastate.edu

Carl Herndl teaches rhetoric, critical, and literary theory in the Department of English. He writes about the way language maintains and alters social relations and cultural formations, and especially about possibilities or cases of rhetoric as a means for cultural and institutional resistance and change. He has recently written about the rhetorical forms of liberation theology and the movement for social change in Latin America. He also writes about the role of rhetoric in the constitution of scientific knowledge and in the relations between science and political and social practice. In 1996, he co-edited Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, a volume which analyzed environmental discourse and the way discourse both facilitates and complicates environmental action. Most recently, he has been working in agricultural ecology studying the way science, policy, and social practices together determine the conditions and possibilities for rhetorical action. He has been a faculty affiliate in the Statistical Sciences Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory since 2003, and he is currently a member of two ongoing research projects in agricultural ecology at ISU. He teaches a graduate seminar in the "Rhetorical Study of Science" in the Rhetoric and Professional Communication program in the Department of English.

Kimberly Elman Zarecor

Department of Architecture
587 Design
294-5026
zarecor@iastate.edu

Assistant Professor of Architecture (M.Arch, Columbia, 1999; Ph.D., Columbia, 2008) Professor Zarecor researches the cultural and technological history of architecture in 20th-century Czechoslovakia. Her dissertation, “Modernist Dreams: Architecture, Politics and the Housing Question in Czechoslovakia, 1945-56,” follows the development and deployment of standardized mass-housing types such as the prefabricated structural panel building and examines the relationship between Communism and architecture in the Eastern Bloc. At Iowa State, she teaches undergraduate design studios and architectural history including classes on 19th- and 20th-century modernism, the history of the American city, and architecture in Czechoslovakia. Her publications include “Jiri Kroha Reconsidered” in Umeni (2004) and “Stavoprojekt and the Atelier of National Artist Jiri Kroha in the 1950s” in Jiri Kroha (1893–1974)- Architect, Painter, Designer, Theorist: A 20th-century Metamorphosis (Brno: Brno City Museum, 2007). Upcoming book chapters include "Designing for the Socialist Family: The Evolution of Housing Types in Early Socialist Czechoslovakia" in Gender and Everyday Life under State Socialism in East and Central Europe: New Scholarship from the United States and Europe since 1989 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan) and “Czechoslovakia's Model Housing Developments: Modern Architecture for the Socialist Future" in Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities (Austin: University of Texas Press). She is also working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation. To support this research, she has received numerous fellowships and research grants including a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (2002-2003), an ACLS Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship (2003-2004) and a research grant from the Iowa State Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (2006).